From Kansas Farm Boy to 'Dr. Vitamin'

School of Public Health's E.V. McCollum taught the world
about nutrition

By Rod GrahamSchool of Public Health

When William Welch, the founder of the Johns Hopkins School
of Hygiene and Public Health, and his new assistant director,
William Henry Howell, decided to name E.V. McCollum chairman of
the Department of Chemical Hygiene, their choice was so radical
that it shocked even McCollum himself.

As McCollum later wrote in his autobiography, From
Kansas Farm Boy to Scientist: "I could scarcely realize that
I, a worker in an agricultural experiment station, with no
medical training and no contacts with public health, was the
first professor selected to take charge of a department in the
new exciting adventure of training medical and nonmedical
students to reduce or control, and perhaps to eradicate, the
great scourges in the form of diseases which afflicted
mankind."

E.V. McCollum in 1917, newly
arrived at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. William
Welch at first fretted that McCollum, 6 feet tall and weighing
127 pounds, might be too frail for the long haul.

Although the connection between animal experiments and human
nutrition is obvious today, back in 1917, when McCollum was
called to Baltimore, physicians, pathologists and even public
health officials were remarkably uninterested in food. In
reaching outside the traditional boundaries of public
health--sanitary engineering and bacteriology--to name McCollum,
who at the time was at the College of Agriculture at the
University of Wisconsin studying the dietary needs of farm
animals, Welch and Howell showed themselves to be among the first
to suspect that the lives of millions of people in every
generation were being blighted by malnutrition simply through
ignorance.

Ernestine Becker McCollum, the dietitian who married
McCollum during his retirement, said of that era, "The idea of
food having anything to do with pathological conditions was
incredible. ... If you had enough to eat, you were well-fed."

Born on a Kansas farm in 1879, McCollum was a painstaking
and systematic sort. In high school, he bought a set of the
Encyclopedia Britannica and eventually read every volume
(although he confessed to merely skimming the articles on higher
mathematics). After getting his doctorate in chemistry from Yale,
he took his first professional job at the College of Agriculture
of the University of Wisconsin, where he was presented with the
task of finding out why corn-fed animals were healthier than cows
fed only wheat or oats--a problem of obvious interest to
Wisconsin's dairy farmers.

McCollum soon realized, however, that using cows to study
nutritional outcomes was going to be a slow boat to nowhere.
Instead, he proposed experimenting on the lowly rat, which,
because it has a short life span and can be easily fed and
housed, would allow him to conduct many more experiments in a
given time and achieve results much faster. Told about this
scheme to start a rat colony, however, the dean of the Ag school
was horrified, saying in effect that if the alumni heard the Ag
school was studying (and feeding!) vermin, they'd have his head.

McCollum went forward anyway, catching rats in an old horse
barn on campus and conducting his experiments in secret. When the
wild rats turned out to be too vicious to maintain in the
laboratory, he traveled to Chicago and bought the more
domesticated albino rats from a pet store.

The first rats were in their laboratory cages by 1907; by
1912 McCollum and his colleague Marguerite Davis began a series
of elegant experiments proving that young rats would grow fat and
healthy on a diet containing butter fat but sicken on the same
diet containing lard, olive oil or bleached cottonseed oil. By
1913 they had isolated the first vitamin, which McCollum dubbed
"factor A," later known as vitamin A.

It was this research that had caught the attention of Welch
and Howell in 1916-17. Howell had originally intended to include
nutrition in his own Department of Physiological Hygiene but was
so impressed by McCollum's vitamin A work that he and Welch
decided to appoint the lanky farm boy to head a separate
Department of Chemical Hygiene (later Biochemistry). During his
tenure from 1917 to 1944, McCollum built his department into a
world-famous center for nutrition research and probably did more
than any other individual to improve the diet of the American
people.

Harry Day met E.V. McCollum in 1930, when he came to work
for McCollum. Day, now professor emeritus of chemistry at Indiana
University, reminisced at the April 2000 reunion of the School of
Public Health's Biochemistry alumni about his first meeting with
the great man. "I could feel his determination and wisdom, and
was inspired," said Day, who would go on to develop the first
stanisfluoride toothpaste, Crest. "I had come to Baltimore by
Greyhound bus from Iowa and met him at his office, and he
welcomed me very nicely. As we talked, I noticed an old-fashioned
typewriter--it wasn't old-fashioned then, of course!--where he
did all his own typing. And he had a rubber eraser and brush
attached by a shoestring to the typewriter, as a time-saver. He
was a very systematic man."

McCollum's work at the School of Public Health was indeed
systematic, patient and productive. He and his team fed thousands
of rats on hundreds of carefully controlled diets in order to
measure the effects of the presence or absence of many specific
nutrients, including vitamins, minerals and amino acids. Over the
years, this meticulous man and his students recorded the effects
on animals of the inorganic elements calcium, phosphorus,
fluorine, magnesium, manganese, iron, zinc, sodium, potassium,
boron and cobalt.

McCollum, not his students, defined the problems worth
investigating. Because of his firm grip on the research agenda,
investigations in the Department of Chemical Hygiene were
well-coordinated from the start. (In his succinct Kansas manner,
McCollum once said that the successful professor's fitness for
the job was determined "by his ability to make his conversations
and lectures more interesting than song, dance, drink and fast
driving.")

In the course of experiments performed in the early 1920s,
McCollum noticed that some rats fed only on cereal grains
developed a condition similar to rickets in children. At that
time, children with deformed limbs were a common sight on city
streets, but the cause of rickets was unknown. McCollum and his
associates tested the effects on rats of over 300 different diets
while colleagues at the School of Medicine studied bone sections
taken from the animals. In time, they discovered that these rats
could be "cured" by small amounts of cod-liver oil and became
convinced that an "organic factor" in the cod-liver oil was
protective against rickets.

Serendipitously, McCollum heard from a New York researcher
that nearly all the Italian immigrants in New York City suffered
from rickets, and that these people were housed mostly in the
back tenements where sunlight seldom filtered in. McCollum
immediately began investigating the relationships among diet,
sunshine and rickets. Every day, he and his associates carried
young rats fed on deficient diets out into the sunshine. The rats
got sunburned, and their ears peeled, but they didn't develop any
symptoms of rickets; meanwhile, control animals fed the same diet
but left behind in the dark laboratory all developed the
characteristic deformities of the disease. McCollum's group
concluded that the effects of sunlight and cod-liver oil were
similar, if not identical, and that both could be used to prevent
rickets. The discovery of vitamin D led to a generation of
children brought up on cod-liver oil, and to the virtual
elimination of rickets as a childhood disease.

Although McCollum certainly embodied Welch's ideal of the
dedicated and original scientist whose research had profound
importance for the public's health, he went Welch one better by
sharing his discoveries not just with other scientists but also
with the public. In more than 160 "Our Daily Diet" columns for
McCall's magazine between 1922 and 1946, he and his colleagues
discussed such topics as, "Are there such things as nerve foods?"
and "Green vegetables are unbottled medicines." Also, as a member
of Herbert Hoover's Advisory Council on Nutrition, McCollum
traveled the country giving public lectures urging mothers to
serve more milk, leafy vegetables, eggs, liver and wheat bread,
and fewer refined sugars and starches. He summarized the results
of his nutrition research in two books--The Newer Knowledge of
Nutrition (1918) and, with J. Ernestine Becker, Food, Nutrition
and Health (6th edition, 1947)--and throughout his career never
stopped criticizing vitamin manufacturers, whom he equated with
old-time purveyors of patent medicines.

McCollum moved outside the laboratory in other ways as well.
He personally surveyed the health conditions of children in
Baltimore's schools and orphanages, organized nutrition classes
for underweight students and provided food supplements for those
he found were undernourished. In the city's Negro Orphans' Home,
for instance, he found the children subsisting entirely on
cereals, tubers and roots, a diet inadequate for human nutrition,
and provided the boys and girls with milk powder supplements that
restored them to normal weight and health.

In 1951 Time magazine reported, "Dr. Vitamin has done more
than any other man to put vitamins back in the nation's bread and
milk, to put fruit on American breakfast tables, fresh vegetables
and salad greens in the daily diet." (Even today, a Web site
promising among other things "perfect weight loss" reads in part,
"As advocated by the pioneer nutritionist Dr. E.V. McCollum, we
should eat those foods which will spoil, rot, sour, ferment,
mildew or develop a bad odor, but, of course, we should eat them
before this happens. Nature's tiny creatures ... choose their
foods without commercial inducement. If they refuse to eat a
food, then this can be your signal to avoid it also.")

E.V. McCollum in retirement,
ca. 1960

Although E.V. McCollum "retired" from the School of Public
Health in the 1940s, he immediately set up a small laboratory on
the Homewood campus and continued experimenting. Well into the
1950s, he was still at it. The last survivor of the School of
Public Health's original faculty, he died in 1967 at age 89.

McCollum's research at the School of Public Health came full
circle when in the early 1980s the school's current dean, Alfred
Sommer, and his colleagues uncovered widespread vitamin A
deficiency around the world and established its link with
excessive morbidity and mortality in children. Worldwide
eradication of vitamin A deficiency has become an important goal
of the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the U.S. Agency for
International Development.

This article draws heavily on the book Disease &
Discovery, A History of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and
Public Health, 1916-1939, by Elizabeth Fee (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987).